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Pam Zuege's ninth-graders tracked Hurricane Mitch as it swept
across Central America. They've also seen the effects of volcanoes,
followed thunderstorms, and watched as scientists charted seismic
tremors from Japan to California.
"The kids could actually see the data as it came out, as the
researchers were seeing it," says Zuege, who teaches geography
in the Birdville Independent School District near Fort Worth,
Texas. "That's something a textbook couldn't do."
But of course, the Internet can, and Zuege has made extensive
use of it in her class at Richland High School. This fall she
will begin another challenge: moving to the new Birdville High
School to teach a pilot geography class that will rely almost
exclusively on information stored on laptop computers or accessible
via the web.
The course is the first of its kind in Texas, which made national
headlines last year when Jack Christie, then chairman of the Texas
State Board of Education, suggested the state consider replacing
textbooks with laptops. "With computers and other electronic and
information technologies, Texas does not have to wait years for
the world-class system of public education that its people want
and need," Christie wrote last fall in the Austin American-Statesman.
"It is only a few keystrokes away."
Will computers replace textbooks? Perhaps the more pertinent
question is: when?
"I think conventional textbooks -- they're pretty much dead,"
says Peter Cookson, director of educational outreach at Columbia
University's Teachers College. "Not this year, but in the next
decade."
The advantages of web-based and other digital materials -- rapid
updates, interactivity, customization, audio, animation, and sometimes
even lowered production costs -- have led many educators to view
them as attractive alternatives to traditional texts. The technology
is addressing the needs of classrooms that have moved from teacher-led
to student-initiated exercises, from individual to cooperative
learning, from strict grade and subject boundaries to interdisciplinary
work that might involve children of various ages and abilities.
And technology doesn't merely respond to changes in education;
it creates changes of its own, influencing, for example, the roles
of teachers and the scheduling and makeup of classes.
Down but not out
But while the textbook might be under assault from this barrage
of electronic media, it's too early to count it out just yet.
"I was reading how textbooks were going to disappear in the
'60s and how book publishing was going to disappear, and I see
[book publishing] is as healthy today as it's ever been," says
Walter J. Koetke, director of The Learning Odyssey, a nonprofit
group that creates interactive, Internet-based software for elementary
and middle school classrooms.
"The textbook is a structuring of knowledge," says Saul Rockman,
president of Rockman Et Al, an education consulting firm in San
Francisco. "It organizes an enormous amount of information in
a socially acceptable pattern."
In the future, Rockman adds, "There will still be someone structuring
knowledge."
But the idea of a single authoritative voice, the textbook's
voice, might become increasingly outmoded as more diverse sources
of information -- and more timely sources -- vie for attention.
"If all we do is scan in textbooks and make them available digitally,
we haven't accomplished much," says Michael Hannafin, who holds
a chair in technology-enhanced learning at the University of Georgia.
He hastens to add that the Internet and other fiercely competitive
digital purveyors will keep that from happening.
To glimpse this postmodern classroom, you can go to Zuege's
school or travel some 600 miles west to Ysleta Elementary School
in El Paso, where Sharon Wiles' sixth-graders are taking part
in a pilot laptop program being developed by NetSchools of Mountain
View, Calif. (Birdville's program is being undertaken by EdSoft
Corp. of Dallas.)
Earlier this school year, each of Wiles' geography students
picked a different country to research on the Internet. The students
learned about their chosen nation's culture, economic base, and
political system, and were asked to use this information to advise
Wiles on whether she would want to live there. The students urged
her to pack her bags for such places as Australia, Austria, and
Germany.
In the course of the program, the children are learning to assess
the accuracy and legitimacy of information from various Internet
sources. And when those sources don't agree, they turn to an old-fashioned
hardbound encyclopedia to resolve discrepancies.
"You would need a couple of dozen textbooks to get through all
the information that they wanted," Wiles says.
An industry trend
Much of this move to new instructional materials is being encouraged
by the textbook publishers themselves. In both K-12 and higher
education, there has long been a demand for ancillary materials
with textbooks -- workbooks, question sets, quizzes, tests, software
on disk or CD-ROM, and now web resources. The web supplements,
however, seem to be an especially forceful step in this evolution.
Texas recently issued a request for bids on new textbooks, says
Robert H. Leos, senior director of textbook administration for
the Texas Education Agency. "I can predict that we're going to
get a fairly wide variety of electronic and print materials in
response," he says.
At the Meridian School District in Boise, Idaho, Director of
Instruction Linda Clark says, "We've moved away from text-only
adoption [and] will eventually move away from the notion that
every student has to have a textbook." The district supplements
textbooks with multimedia and kit-based science materials. This
practice dovetails with an ongoing shift from a strictly fact-based
curriculum to a more concept-driven approach.
Publishers have found that it is easy to create free Internet
materials for those who adopt their textbooks and subscription
services for those who don't. At the postsecondary level, for
example, Simon and Schuster is offering College NewsLink, rewarding
the buyers of their textbooks with access to a site that provides
news stories directly related to issues in the book.
Having a web site for a college class is also an increasingly
common practice, and publishers are working to make it easier.
In higher education, says W.W. Norton's Fred McFarland, textbooks
must increasingly carry web-based ancillaries if a professor is
to consider them for adoption. McFarland, manager of distance
learning for the publisher, has been working on a project to provide
web-based course materials with the textbooks it releases this
fall. Resources will include study guides, syllabus suggestions,
animations, lecture outlines, and additional content created specifically
for the web.
Following suit, K-12 science textbook publishers announced a
partnership with the National Science Teachers Association in
March that links relevant, age-appropriate web sites to the pages
of science textbooks. By using special codes placed in textbook
margins, students can access supplementary materials on the web
through the sciLINKS site.
Another innovation affecting the textbook market is custom publishing.
Publishers like Houghton Mifflin Company have taken advantage
of new printing technologies to create services such as Bibliobase,
which allow college professors to assemble custom textbooks. Bibliobase,
now nearly three years old, offers various resources for history
and chemistry classes. Set-up costs are minimal, and whether you
print 10 books or 10,000, the production cost per book remains
roughly the same.
Professors select the sections or images they want, arrange
them in the order they want, perhaps add some of their own content,
and push a button to send their order for their class "reader."
Victoria Kieirnan, manager of new media for HMCO, stresses that
the finished product is not a collection of photocopied pages.
The book is printed in two-column pages and paper-bound with a
die-cut cover showing the name of the instructor and class.
Will public schools be adopting customized textbooks anytime
soon? Perhaps not until some of the technology's inherent problems
are resolved. For example, while customized texts are indeed innovative,
they might not stand up to the binding requirements of most public
schools.
Yet there are advantages. Textbooks could be aligned loosely
with state standards. Montana, for example, could have textbooks
aligned with Montana's standards instead of those in Texas, California,
and Florida, as can happen now. Or, roughly the same subject matter
could be treated with varying reading levels or styles.
The Meridian School District is taking a preliminary look at
custom publishing, Clark says. She says the district is attracted
to the idea of being able to update textbooks yearly, rather than
every five years, as is the case now. And, Clark adds, "We would
print individual books in the sequence that fits our curriculum."
Responding to individual needs, of course, could create controversy
with web-originated texts. What Gilbert Sewall, director of the
New York City-based American Textbook Council, calls "blowout"
items -- such as evolution or the depiction of Columbus -- could
hypothetically be handled according to individual parents' requests.
Maybe one parent wants a book with only creationism, another wants
only evolution, and a third wants both. Sewall suspects that districts
and schools will leave this Pandora's Box alone, even if customization
came to the classroom or district level.
"The truth is," Sewall said in an article on history textbooks,
"most textbook purchasers desire an instructional program delivered
to them as a whole. They do not want to take the time (or feel
that they do not have the expertise) to build a course of study
and history program from scratch."
Nor are textbook publishers likely to encourage such options.
"It is not a business that rewards risk taking, experimentation,
or uniqueness," Sewall says.
James Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me (a bestseller
subtitled Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong)
agrees with Sewall. Loewen is enthusiastic about the web bringing
more primary resource documents and other supplementary materials
to the classroom. He hopes that, at least in history, the Internet
will encourage teachers to not only supplement their textbooks,
but to teach against the text with web-based materials.
Textbooks typically come in a God-like monotone, Loewen says,
but "history is not written by God, and it's not in a monotone.
There are many voices writing history." And because many web sites
contradict one another, the web forces students to become critical
readers of many viewpoints.
Supply and demand
Publishers now have web sites offering links and lesson plans
that are relevant to their textbooks, but industry watchers predict
that they will soon switch gears and create their own web content
that requires few clicks beyond their pages. They are likely to
start with free ancillary materials, and then offer supplementary
materials for a fee.
Publishers of elementary-level texts aren't hearing any demand
yet for supplements other than paper, video, and maybe CD-ROM.
Even so, they have been posting ancillary web resources in preparation
for the expected trend. Go to the Scott
Foresman Addison Wesley Longman Education Network or McGraw-Hill's
Resource Village, and you will find Internet activities tied
directly to chapters in textbooks. An online lesson plan for a
third-grade social studies unit, for example, asks students to
create a community newsletter and provides a link to an existing
newsletter.
Secondary schools are offering publishers more opportunities.
Marty Smith of Prentice Hall cites a recent meeting she attended
with science teachers in New Mexico. After her potential customers
sat through the all-day presentation, she says, the home page
for the textbook was the one theme that really generated a response.
"For higher-end and secondary subjects," Smith says, "web ancillaries
are one of the factors in the buying decision -- they are not
the deciding factor yet, but we expect at one point they will
be."
The Prentice-Hall School
site offers regional and state home pages, correlations between
state standards and Prentice-Hall texts, links to important sites,
author presentations, and other material.
Textbook publishers are also eyeing the home market, where purchases
by parents could speed development of web-based materials. Addison
Wesley Longman (AWL) has invested substantially in developing
a web site called The
Know Zone, which is designed to provide learning experiences
for grades three through eight in synch with Scott Foresman textbooks.
The site, free with the purchase of the textbook, is also marketed
as a general learning tool that families can subscribe to. AWL
will also be creating a subscription Know Zone product for schools
that don't use their textbooks. Cindy Hudson, vice president for
digital publishing, says Know Zone is a supplementary product,
not a replacement for the textbook. "You can really close the
home/school connection," she says.
Other publishers are less willing to nurture a new market from
scratch.
"Our philosophy with technology," says Jack Witmer, president
of McGraw-Hill's educational and professional school division,
"is that we want to be on the wave when it breaks. We're constantly
researching ideas that meet the needs of the marketplace, but
we have to be careful not to get in front of the wave."
Witmer plans to introduce more extensive web-based products
"whenever the time is right and school districts want to make
better use" of the Internet. When we reach that time, he predicts,
interactive TV, which combines the web with television programming,
will be the most attractive technology to schools.
Political hurdles
Innovation is one thing, but practicality -- given the current
constraints of state bureaucracies -- is quite another. Texas
has tried to identify and overcome political hurdles, with mixed
success. The passage of Senate Bill 1 in 1995 permitted online
materials to be used in place of textbooks. As a result, LOGAL
Software, a small company developing web-based science curriculum
and simulations, appears to be among the first to make Internet
products approved for use in place of a textbook.
But the situation has raised some unresolved issues. LOGAL could
potentially be updating its site daily, adding sections when animals
get cloned or new stars are discovered, say, or simply tinkering
with pedagogical improvements. But taking advantage of this ability
for rapid change is not legal under current statutes.
"The adoption process does not have a provision for updating,"
says Leos, of the Texas Education Agency (TEA).
Technically, anything added to the LOGAL
site after the adoption would not have been reviewed as part
of the adoption process, so LOGAL simply froze the Texas product
in time. Making electronic materials work with the adoption process
is one of many issues the education agency examined in a recent
report to the legislature. TEA's Computer
Network Study Project includes recommendations for delivering
updated supplements to textbooks via the Internet, the feasibility
and cost-effectiveness of developing electronic textbooks for
students who are blind or have other disabilities, and the need
for training teachers to integrate this kind of content into their
classrooms. Pilot projects, such as the one in the Birdville Independent
School District, will allow the state to follow up on the study.
Interestingly, if the time is coming to put the printed textbook
in mothballs, Texas might be undermining its own influence in
the nation's curricular offerings. Right now, as one of the largest
states that adopts texts statewide, Texas has a strong voice in
deciding what publishers will include in their printed texts --
and, as a result, what students nationwide will study. If web-based
textbooks or supplements displace printed texts, they will also
displace the current role that the major textbook publishers and
the largest states play in deciding content.
But such a scenario is still a few years off, says Elliot Soloway,
an engineering professor at the University of Michigan who conducts
research on the use of educational technology. "There still isn't
a channel, there still isn't a market, there still isn't a culture
for buying [web-based] material," Soloway says.
That will all change in two to three years, he predicts, as
increases in bandwidth quicken the speed of Internet communication.
"Then it's going to be like the Swiss watch industry being blindsided
by the Japanese watch industry," Soloway says. "It's going to
happen overnight."
One educator who will be ready come morning is Sharon Wiles,
the sixth-grade geography teacher in El Paso whose students use
the Internet extensively to research foreign countries. Could
she ever go back to a textbook-driven course?
"I could not do it," Wiles replies. "In fact, I have not used
a textbook, truthfully, for the last four or five years."
Mary Axelson is editor of The Heller Reports
on Internet Strategies for Education Markets. Lawrence
Hardy is an associate editor of Electronic School. Cover illustration
by Margie McMullin Fullmer.
NovaNET. The oldest
comprehensive online curriculum program on the market, NovaNET
offers more than 10,000 hours of self-paced instruction and assessment
in all subject areas for middle school, high school, and adult
learners. More than 800 schools subscribe to the service, delivered
via a proprietary 56 Kbps network. Typically used in lab settings
and by homebound students, the system includes conferencing and
e-mail features. (800) 937-6682.
The Learning Odyssey. A
complete instructional package delivered via the Internet, TLO
is intended for home-based learners as well as schools. The service,
launched last year by the Agency for Instructional Technology,
currently offers a full fourth-grade curriculum, with plans in
the works to add grade five in September. Eventually, TLO intends
to provide comprehensive curriculum and assessment for grades
four through nine. (800) 457-4509.
Scholastic Network.
This Internet-based curriculum service, available by paid
subscription for the past five years, will be offered free of
charge to all educators starting in September. Scholastic Network
provides more than 500 interactive, standards-based learning activities
and projects, and is currently used by more than 15,000 elementary
and middle schools. (800) 246-2986.
Educational
Structures. Access to complete and customizable lesson
plans in core subject areas is one of the main draws of Educational
Structures. This Internet-delivered curriculum service also provides
resource centers for teachers and students, as well as a library
of up-to-date educational resource materials. (888) 287-7428.
CCC Destinations
Internet. This online essential-skills instructional program
for adolescent learners and adults offers 12,000 learning activities
in reading, writing, math, and employability skills. CCC Destinations
Internet is delivered via the Internet from servers housed at
Computer Curriculum Corporation to students in alternative education
settings. (408) 745-6270.
CCCnet. Designed
to complement traditional curriculum content with Internet-based
projects, CCCnet provides K-8 curriculum extensions in math, science,
reading, and social studies. Launched as a subscription-based
web site in 1996, CCCnet's activities are designed to foster communication
among schools, provide access to online experts, allow students
to publish their work, and guide teachers and students in their
use of the Internet for learning. (888) CCC-4KIDS.
-- Sidebar by Lars
Kongshem
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